


Certain Dark Things

by burningbright



Series: Fetter strong madness in a silken thread [3]
Category: Discworld - Terry Pratchett
Genre: Book: Hogfather, Child Abuse, F/M, Past Abuse, contains Teatime being Teatime, fear fetish, narratively convenient resurrection, not a crackfic
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2012-05-11
Updated: 2012-05-23
Packaged: 2017-11-05 04:08:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 9,309
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/402277
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/burningbright/pseuds/burningbright
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Some people just won't take a poker to the abdominal cavity for an answer. Teatime is definitely one of them.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Cruelty has a human heart

Hogswatch passed. Susan didn't wait for normality to reassert itself—she grabbed it by the ear and dragged it back into place. She firmly ignored any and everything having to do with the events of that night, with one exception: Gawain's "marble" was duly confiscated (although Susan's skin crawled at actually having to touch the horrible thing) and put away where no small children could find it. Gawain, perhaps out of a greater sense of self-preservation than she would ordinarily have given him credit for, handed it over after only a token struggle.

"Sometimes it moves on its own when it thinks you aren't looking," he confided as he dropped it in her outstretched hand. It seemed to Susan that it rocked in her palm much longer than it should have. She tried to ignore the fact that she'd put three locks on the box after that, instead of the one that any sensible person would consider sufficient to contain any inanimate object. It wasn't as if three locks would do any more to stop it getting out than one. It wasn't as if it could get out at all. It was just a little glass orb, no bigger than… well, no bigger than a human eye. But Gawain was right; it did move on its own.

Often, late at night, she could hear it rolling around in the box. Usually it was quiet, a gentle _tap tap_ against the sides, but there were some nights when it seemed determined to break free, hurtling around the box with such a loud clatter that she was afraid it would wake the house. On those nights she muffled it under her pillow, which helped with the noise but did nothing for her nerves.

That was what finally did it, she told herself—listening to that damn thing rolling about on its own in the dark. She had to get it out of her room, and she had to find out what on the Disc could possibly have driven _anyone_ , even someone as mad as Teatime, to stick it in their head. After some consideration, she took it to Death's house, where it could sit on a shelf and rocket about in its triple-locked box as much as it wanted without giving anyone the screaming heebie-jeebies in the dark watches of the night. Not that it had frightened her. It was just hard to sleep with all the noise.

Then she went into the library and found Teatime's biography. It was a rather thicker volume than she had expected, and she paused before opening it. Where should she start? She had no idea when Teatime had acquired the eye; in fact, she knew hardly anything about him at all. He had been the mad kid that no one wanted to play with, the one who didn't know the line between right and wrong, and he'd never grown out of it. That was it.

Well, starting at the beginning was always best when you didn't know quite what you were looking for. She flipped through the early sections of the usual baby business quite quickly at first, just barely skimming the pages. The early parts of biographies were always boring, unless you were particularly interested in bowel movements and crying. Then a word caught her eye, and she stopped—read for a moment—flipped back a page or two—read a bit more. The colour drained from her face. Susan flipped forward again, with purpose now, occasionally stopping and reading, getting paler all the while. When her hands started to shake so much that she was in danger of dropping the book, she sat down and rested it in her lap.

After a while, she had to set it aside so that she could go and be quietly but thoroughly sick.

_Well_. That at least explained one thing. When you saw it like that, it was no wonder he'd ended up a scholarship boy at the Assassin's School. It was just amazing he'd lived long enough to get there. Replacing his eye with that _thing_ (a scrying crystal! How could any parent, no matter how twisted, willfully pluck out their own child's eye and replace it with _a scrying crystal?_ ) just barely made the top ten of the horrible episodes she'd read in those early pages. She would be having nightmares about the thing with the stove and the needles for weeks, and that would be if she was lucky. And as for the thing with the poker a few pages later… that had not been good. Not good at all. She found herself feeling queasily sorry for her choice of weapon in those last desperate moments. But it wasn't as if she could have _known_ ….

She set the book on the lectern at the end of the row of shelves she'd taken it from, where it would be easy to find if she needed it again. She'd read enough, and more than enough, for one day. What she wanted now was a really good cup of hot tea and an afternoon with normal children, children who thought the worst thing that could happen to them was not getting dessert. On her way out, she stuck her head into Death's study.

"Grandfather?"

YES, SUSAN?

"Do you remember Teatime?"

This question gave Death some pause. THE MEAL YOU HAVE AROUND FOUR O'CLOCK IN THE AFTERNOON?, he ventured cautiously.

"No, the man. From Hogswatch."

Death considered this for a few moments. He met quite a lot of humans, although he generally only met them once. Few individuals made a lasting impression.

"The one I, er, killed. With the poker," Susan prompted, guilt prodding her sharply in the ribs again.

AH, YES. MR. TEH-AH-TIM-EH. THE YOUNG MAN WHO ALMOST KILLED THE HOGFATHER. Somehow, the perpetually grinning skull managed to project an impression of disapproval.

"Yes. Well, Gawain found his eye in the fireplace, and I've left it in a little box on the bookshelf in the front hall. Could you just sort of… keep an eye on it for me? It's not that I think it will do anything—well, anything but make a racket, it will do that—but I can't keep it in the house with the children, and it's not really the sort of thing one ought to chuck away."

OF COURSE.

"Thanks. I've got to run, but I'll be back soon." And with that, she was gone. Death sighed. Susan never stayed for a nice chat.

* * *

In the library, Teatime's biography lay forgotten on the lectern. After a moment, a new quiet scritching joined the susurrus of countless lives being recorded, and the book added a page.


	2. The world of perpetual solitude

Weeks passed quietly into months, and then into years. Susan didn't forget about Teatime—Susan never forgot anything—but between one thing and another he faded to the back of her mind. Life was finally _normal_ , or at least as normal as she could ever hope it would get. She started teaching and found, to her surprise, that she did enjoy using her powers from time to time—but _strictly_ in the service of lessons. She saved the world. (Again. There really had to be some sort of limit on how many times one person had to save the world, didn't there?) In the process, she met a very nice young man—and he was nice, even if he, despite being the anthropomorphic personification of Time, was never on time for _anything_. She had what every young woman wanted: a good job, a nice young man to walk out with, and even a little place of her own. True, Lobsang tended to show up for dates before they'd actually made them, or occasionally weeks after (and, on one memorable occasion, a whole two months after the concert they'd had tickets for), but he was always very apologetic. True, the little place of her own, having been built in the narrow space between two existing buildings, was more like a series of long, doorless hallways stacked one on top of another than what people conventionally thought of as a house. Still, it _was_ her own, which was nothing to sneeze at in a city as overpopulated as Ankh-Morpork. Everything was actually going well for once.

And then Lobsang broke up with her. "It's just not going to work out," he said, and he refused to elaborate, but Susan thought he sounded very certain. He was clearly angry and hurt, and a little baffled, and she _knew_ she hadn't done anything to make him feel that way. Not yet, anyway, but she had a sinking feeling that she was going to, sooner or later. It had never occurred to her before that dating the anthropomorphic personification of Time might mean getting dumped for something she hadn't actually _done_ yet.

After that, there were no more young men. It wasn't that she didn't try (and she did, if only to satisfy her grandfather, whose interrogations on the subject were painfully unsubtle), but there just weren't that many young men who were interested in dating a strong-willed young woman who happened to be Death's granddaughter and occasionally took over the family business for him. She was too weird even for the young men at Biers, most of whom were really only called men as a courtesy. The Watch's Igor had made a few tentative overtures, but… well, no. No matter what the rumours said about why Igors were so popular with the ladies, she just couldn't get past the stitches, and his experiments in bio-artificing confused her Death senses in a very disturbing way. Ears and noses and kidneys didn't have souls, she was sure, and yet they were unquestionably alive (and they had little arms and legs, which unnerved her without any input from the Death parts of her brain at all). Eventually, she decided that she was just one of those women who was born to be a "Miss". It was right there in her name: she was Miss Susan to everyone. People said that 'Miss' with the same kind of respect watchmen put into the 'Mister' in Mister Vimes. It would be a shame to waste it, really.

With that settled, there was just one more problem: Susan was getting bored. The monotony that had seemed like a blessing before Lobsang had so completely and comprehensively vanished from her life was starting to feel much more like a curse.

For the first time in more than a year, Susan remembered the little box she'd left in Death's foyer. Surely it couldn't hurt just to try and find out where that crystal had come from, could it? Just a little mystery, a harmless little something to keep her from going stark raving mad from the repetitive dullness of uninterrupted normality.

Later, she would look back and say that she really should have known better.

* * *

Teatime woke in darkness to the sound of his own breath. He was alive. He was fairly sure about that, because he'd never heard of any of the undead _needing_ to breathe, and a quick experiment in trying not to suggested that he did. He was also fairly sure that he hadn't been alive, not very long ago. He could remember dying, feeling the poker ripping through flesh and organs, shattering bones. He could remember recognizing the mortal wound for what it was, and being disappointed about… something. Not dying, strangely enough, but the _something_ faded away like mist every time he tried to grasp it. He could remember Death telling him to stop hiding—and then nothing, not even darkness, not even the misty sense of something forgotten or out of reach. Just an emptiness where memory should have been.

He found that strange blank disturbing, but he had a far more urgent sense that he had forgotten something _very important_. Whole swathes of what he could remember from before his death made no sense at all. The memories were strangely blurred. They skipped and stuttered and jumped, and the more he thought about it, the less sense it made. He could remember the poker with astonishing clarity, but the memory of the person who had thrown it stubbornly refused to resolve. There had been another person, he was sure. The children, Death, and… someone. Someone angry.

As he lay there, considering, it began to dawn on him that whatever he was lying on was very cold, and the air around him not much warmer. Since he didn't seem to have any clothes or blankets, hypothermia was soon going to be a pressing concern. The echoes of his breathing suggested that the space he was in was very large, and very empty.

Well, he would just have to go find either some clothes or someplace warmer. Preferably both. When he moved, his limbs responded sluggishly, stiff as if from long stillness. After a long and embarrassing struggle, he got himself upright, and was glad there had been no one to witness his clumsiness. He would have had to kill them, and his knives seemed to have gone the way of his clothes. Correction to his itinerary: first he would arm himself. _Then_ he would do something about warming up. Slowly, listening to the echoes and testing the faint currents of air that moved through the darkness, he set off in what seemed like a likely direction.

* * *

Elsewhere, Death looked up sharply as he felt the fabric of reality make a few small but significant adjustments. The new lifetimer he found later that afternoon, sitting alone on its own little shelf—a shelf that hadn't existed that morning, and that had always been there now—was hazily translucent, as if it weren't quite sure it existed or not. Despite its nebulosity, Death could make out the name on the nameplate, if only just.

JO( _squigglesquiggle_ )N T( _squiggle_ )IME, it said.

HMM, he said.

But he left the lifetimer where it was


	3. The mystery which binds me still

High up on Cori Celesti, Fate looked at the game board and laughed. Again. It was a remarkably unpleasant sound, and it had been getting quite a lot of use during this particular game.

The Lady merely smiled, and one of her pawns began, at last, to move. (She had—well, not cheated, precisely. She had simply put a finger on the scales of probability at just the right moment, the result of which was the reappearance of a pawn Fate had taken some time ago. It had taken some time for the pawn to show up again in her box, but it had been worth the wait to see Fate's face when she'd placed it on the board again. That had stopped him laughing for a while, the smug bastard.)

If any mortals had been present, it's possible they would have found Fate's sudden silence even more frightening than his laughter.

* * *

In the end, Teatime had to compromise. As far as he could tell there were no weapons (or anything else) to be found in any of the vast, echoing spaces he found as he followed the traces of fresh air from… room to room? Cave to cave? It was impossible to say. He fumed at the slow pace and lack of information forced on him by the lack of his left eye. He could scarcely remember a time when he hadn't had it, when he hadn't been able to see in the dark and a little bit outside of what boring people called reality. What he did at last find was a way out. As he followed the strongest current of air that smelled of something besides stone and dust, the darkness around him began to lighten by degrees. Every so often he had to stop, eye stinging and watering from the unaccustomed light, and wait until he could adjust to the growing brightness. When he reached the exit, the sun was going down. He was standing at the mouth of a cave more than halfway up a mountain, and he had absolutely no idea where he was. Odds seemed good that it was somewhere in the Ramtops, since he could see a family of boulders taking a stroll across the valley, and also that it was summer, since no important bits had frozen and snapped off like icicles yet.

So he was naked, unarmed, and lost somewhere in the most magical and unpredictable mountains on the Disc. Teatime smiled. This was going to be _fun_.

* * *

Teatime's biography was exactly where Susan had left it more than three years ago, still open to the page with… she shuddered. Yes, still open to the page with the knives and the nasty little diagrams and the magical circle just big enough to hold a child. She could have done without the illustrations. Still, at least this time she knew exactly what she was looking for. Hopefully that would keep her from accidentally stumbling on anything too horrible.

Susan flipped through the book, looking for the place where the index started. When she reached the back sections, she realized why Teatime's biography had seemed thicker than usual for someone of his age: it had appendices, page after page of them, full of maps and definitions and diagrams and lists. Appendix C stopped her cold. Each page had an extraordinarily detailed drawing of Teatime, labelled by year, and each drawing mapped out in clinical detail the injuries he had acquired in that year. Susan turned the pages with horrified fascination, astonished and infuriated all over again by the damage Teatime's parents had done, and had allowed others to do, to their son. The illustration for his fifth year was the worst, with the gaping darkness where the child's left eye should have been and the cool, detached description of how it had been lost. For a moment Susan wanted to slam the book shut, forget all about Teatime and the eye and everything that went with it, but she didn't. She felt in an obscure way that she owed Teatime this much, at least, for killing him—to know and remember what had made him what he was.

The pages after he turned 8 were much less disturbing, and Susan began flipping several pages at a time in the hope that she would be able to skip past the one page she didn't want to see, dimly registering that as the pictures went from boy to teenager to man, the new injuries lessened until there were none at all. Naturally, though, the book fell open to the one page she had been trying to avoid. She was struck again by how young Teatime looked, and realized with a shock that he had been three years younger than she was now when he'd died.

It was impossible not to look at the single dark blot drawn in just below the ribs, with its neat accompanying paragraph cataloguing cause and effect that ended with one lonely, bold word: **Fatal**. Susan jerked her eyes away from the word, which somehow seemed faintly accusatory despite the clinical detachment of the description that preceded it. What else could she have done? He'd been about to ki—well, _severely inconvenience_ Death, right in front of the children. Besides, he hadn't seemed like the kind of Assassin who could stop with just one. It had been him or them.

Slowly, she began to realize that although the Jonathan Teatime of the early drawings had been essentially sexless, as all young children are, the drawing that she'd been staring at while she wrestled with her conscience was very emphatically not. She turned the page quickly, a hot blush rising in her cheeks. She was here to find out about the scrying stone, so it was time to stop getting distracted and start doing some serious research. (Not that she'd been distracted, she told herself. Not like _that_. Not about _Teatime_.)

* * *

Once Teatime was out in the open, it was gratifyingly simple to arm himself, even if the weapon was nothing more exotic than a sturdy pointed stick. Clothing proved to be more difficult, and while the relative warmth of the weather meant that Teatime's health was not in any imminent danger, he was not particularly anxious to prolong the situation. Sooner or later he was bound to find civilization again, and even Teatime was aware that casual public nudity was beyond the pale.

After several days of leisurely travel (most of it vertical, although the sheer mountain cliffs were a stroll through the park compared to some of the challenges Ankh-Morpork provided for the keen edificeer, even without proper depth perception), Teatime came across the first hint of human habitation: a pocket-sized meadow tucked into the side of a mountain, full of the sturdy little dwarf sheep favored by people who lived where land was at a premium, watched over by an astonishingly beautiful golden dog. As soon as it saw Teatime, it yelped excitedly and tried to wag its tail, roll over, and run in circles all at once (astonishingly beautiful golden dogs also being, without fail, astonishingly stupid. They can be recommended for their looks and obedience, but if you are looking for intelligence, look elsewhere). Teatime put an end to its gymnastics by the simple expedient of scratching it behind the ears while he considered his options.

If he waited until the shepherd came to check the flock, he could simply follow him back to civilisation, with its attendant conveniences of knives and clothes. On the other hand, there was no knowing when the shepherd would come. Ramtop sheep were hardy creatures, and when guarded by a dog they required little tending. If the shepherd had visited the flock recently, it might be days before he returned, and Teatime did not relish the idea of waiting for days with nothing but sheep and a particularly dim-witted dog for company. He cast a thoughtful eye over the close-cropped grass of the meadow, and that decided him. If the shepherd had checked on this flock in the last few days, he would have moved them to new pasture. If he was any good as a shepherd at all, he would be back either that afternoon or the next morning to move the flock before they grazed this little patch down to bare earth.

The shepherd arrived the next morning just as the sun was rising over the little fringe of trees where Teatime had hidden himself. The noise of the flock made him almost embarrassingly easy to follow, even with Teatime allowing sufficient distance to remain unobserved despite the lack of cover. Their path led precipitously downwards, following the path of one of the innumerable streams which ran through the mountains. Teatime thought about their path in relation to the river, thought again about the sheep and the time of year, and sighed. It looked like he was going to a sheep shearing.

* * *

"I've got the last of 'em, Mum!" Nanny Ogg's youngest son but one announced—rather unnecessarily, in view of the sheep milling around in front of him.

"Took you long enough, our Darron. Go on and get 'em down to the river." Nanny Ogg's reply to her son was almost automatic. Her attention was fixed on the woods behind him. "I'll be along in a bit. I think I'm just going to sit in the shade and have a bit of rest before I join in." Darron nodded obediently and herded the unruly mass of sheep off towards the crowd on the riverbank. Nanny kept her eyes on the trees. Yes, there it was again—a tremor of leaves, and a brief flash of something pale in the shady darkness. She chuckled and ambled over.

Nanny took a seat just at the edge of the little forest and began methodically packing her pipe. "You can go on pretending to be a tree if you like, my lad, but I ain't never seen a tree with a tonker before," she said casually, without looking away from the task at hand. There was no response. She nodded, as if that was what she had been expecting (and indeed, it was). "Now there ain't many people as travels 'round here in the nuddy—leastwise, not on purpose—so I expect you'd be glad of something to keep the cold off." More silence, but it was an attentive sort of silence. "Me, I've always been partial to handsome young men, which you is, even with the…" she waved her hand in the general direction of her left eye. Anyone watching from the group down by the river would have thought she was waving away a fly. "So if you were to still be here 'round, say, midnight—which obviously you won't because I'm just a mad old biddy talking to an exciting new variety of tree guaranteed to be _very_ popular with the ladies, if you take my meaning—it might be that some of our Nev's old clothes could change hands." She lit the pipe and puffed a bit to get it going. "'Course, you'd be having to tell me how you landed yourself out at the old pasture in nothing but the skin you were born in." More silence. Nanny listened to it for a little while as she smoked. After a while, it became the silence of empty woods again. She heaved herself to her feet and went to supervise the shearing.

* * *

Nanny Ogg strolled into the riverbank clearing a little after midnight with a bundle of cloth tucked under her arm and stood, watching the river in the moonlight. After a while, she turned around and cast a distinctly appreciative eye over the fair-haired man standing behind her. Teatime, who hadn't felt uncomfortable until that moment, felt a sudden urge to clasp his hands in front of him. The cheerfully unapologetic lasciviousness of her gaze made him feel much more naked than he had before.

"All right, my lad. I've held up my end of the deal. Time for you to hold up yours." She settled herself on an upthrust rock and sat watching him with an expectant air. Teatime looked a little longingly at the bundle she'd dropped in her lap, and she settled one hand on it firmly. "I'll have the story first, thank you."

Teatime sighed and began from the beginning. It took some time, but the old woman didn't interrupt. She didn't even bat a lash when he reached his apparent death and resurrection ( "…and the worst part is that I lost all of my knives!"). She did narrow her eyes a bit when he talked about being an Assassin, and she clearly held herself back from commenting on his attempt to kill Death only with great effort. But at last he did finish, and ended rather plaintively with, "And since I don't have any proper weapons, I would at least like to have some clothes." Belatedly he added, "Please."

"What? Oh!" Nanny looked down at the bundle of clothing in her lap and sighed. ""It seems an awful shame, but a deal's a deal." The cheerfully lascivious twinkle was back in her eyes as she tossed the bundle to him. "'Course, if you want a weapon you've got to take them off again." Teatime just looked faintly baffled, certain of the finer points of human sexuality having passed him by. Nanny took in his expression and sighed again, shaking her head. "I can't decide whether it's a blessing or a tragedy for women, lad, you being as cracked as you clearly are, but either way it's a damn waste." She turned a little away. There was a rustling, followed by a faint twang, and she turned around again. The object she tossed in his direction this time was much smaller and heavier than the clothes had been, and it glittered in the moonlight as it flew. Teatime snatched it out of the air with an exclamation of glee. "Cracked as Lancre Gorge," Nanny muttered. "Our Kev found that up in the mountains, out Hangfog way," she said in a louder voice. "Got no use for nasty little knives like that around here, and I'll be just as glad to see the back of it. Carrying it around has given me the willies, I don't mind telling you. I can't say I think much of Assassining, but I'll not deny a man the tools of his trade." She bent a stern look on him. "But you had better believe that I'll come down on you like a ton of bricks if I hear you've been getting a little practice in off the books, my lad. And I will hear, don't you doubt it." And with that, she was all wreathed with smiles again. "Now get those on and come on back with me. You can kip in the garden shed and then we'll get you out and on your way in the morning."

* * *

In the morning, Teatime found himself deposited on the back of a wagon full of iron ore, part of a train headed for Ankh-Morpork. He had a strong suspicion that the driver (who was turning a carefully blind eye to the back of his wagon as per his mother-in-law's orders, which he was more than happy to obey for once, one look having convinced him that he did not want to be able to remember his passenger) was yet another of the innumerable Ogg family. He didn't argue, though. Now that he had told Nanny Ogg his story, he felt an increasingly urgent desire to return to Ankh-Morpork, and even a slow wagon train would get him there faster than walking would.

He pulled out his new knife. It had fit surprisingly well in his hand the previous night, but it had been too dark (and oh, how he missed his eye, because with his eye it had never been too dark) to really examine it well. The long ride down the mountain would be as good a time as any to find out just how good a knife it was.

It took him all of a second to determine that it was a very good knife indeed, because that was how long it took him to realize that he knew this knife as well as he knew his own hand. It was his favorite. He'd been sorrier for its loss than the loss of his clothes.

* * *

Susan closed the book she'd been reading with a weary sigh. Biographies were piled up around her chair in precarious stacks, tracing the path of the scrying stone backwards from Teatime's skull as it moved from one owner to another. Despite her hours of reading, Susan still knew very little more than she had when she'd arrived. None of the biographies had shed more light on what it was or where it came from than Teatime's, and Teatime's was the only biography that gave even a hint about how it worked. Those hints had been fascinating, but trying to understand them had given Susan a skull-shattering headache.

Reading his parents' biographies had been, if anything, even more disturbing than reading Teatime's, and Susan had been glad to bury them at the bottom of the pile when she was done with them. She was even more glad to set aside the books entirely and leave them for the evening. She stopped in front of the bookcase in the front hall on her way out, wavering indecisively. Then, before she could think about the urge too hard, she picked up the little box (still with three locks jammed through the hasp) and tucked it into her bag. It rattled, but the sound lasted no longer than it should have.

She ducked into Death's study long enough to leave him a quick note. Then she let herself out of the house quietly, and let herself out again, more quietly yet, into the real world.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter title from Poe's "Alone." All chapter titles are taken from poetry, but only those poems which in part or in whole complement the themes of the story will be specifically cited.


	4. I who have died am alive again today

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Heads up: in this chapter, Teatime is kind of a creeper. I mean, more than usual. Or at least in different ways.

To Teatime, the journey out of the mountains seemed appallingly slow.

To everyone else in the wagon train, it was the usual white-knuckled headfirst plunge, a time to contemplate the immediacy of mortality and repent for some of their more adventurous and outré sins. (Or, for the most daring, a chance to commit a few.)

After the first, nearly vertical switchback, there was a silent agreement amongst the waggoners that it would be better to drive off the edge of the road (demarcated at this point along their route by the sheer cliff face dropping precipitously away beneath them) than it would be to watch Teatime pacing in the bed of a loaded wagon for another minute. It wasn't just the way he didn't seem to notice the unevenness of the iron ingots underfoot. It wasn't even the muttering and the idle toying with the knife. It was the way he did it all with no more care than if he'd been on the solid, flat ground of the plains instead of in a fully-loaded wagon rocketing down near-vertical slopes at top speed. Even the inevitable potholes and bumps and sudden swerves never caused him to do more than pause for a moment.

When they reached the first town with any river trade to speak of, everyone chipped in to buy him passage on a barge headed downriver. Once he was safely on board, there was a sigh of relief and a general agreement amongst his former travel companions that it would have been worth what they'd paid three times over to be rid of the uncanny bastard.

Teatime didn't hear that, and wouldn't have cared if he had (although he might have stabbed one or two of them just for form's sake, to remind them that there was no need to be rude). His thoughts were all on the insistent pull of Ankh-Morpork. Was this what people meant when they talked about being 'homesick'? Pondering that thought kept him occupied until the barge pulled away from the dock and back out into the steady current of the Ankh. Half an hour later he was in the bow, prowling turn and turn about like a caged animal, and the crew were recalling the waggoners' air of celebration after the one-eyed man had boarded with a sinking feeling.

Traveling by river wasn't exactly swift, particularly in a vessel as cumbersome as the standard river barge, but Teatime had to content himself with the steady drift downstream. It was still faster than the wagons would have been. At night he slept on deck, settled comfortable between bales of wool and several barrels marked with a skull and crossbones that smelled faintly of apples. By day he paced the deck and improvised little combat drills to keep his hand in and stave off the worst of the boredom. The drills themselves weren't that interesting, but watching the crew shift from uneasiness into outright terror served to keep him at least slightly amused.

On the morning of the fourth day, the Water Gate came into sight. Teatime was practically vibrating with impatience by the time the barge docked at the warehouses below the Misbegot Bridge, and he was gone before the crew had finished mooring it. They watched his retreating back with palpable relief, and once the ship had been made fast, the captain broached a barrel of scumble. Scumble was good for the nerves—it made sure you didn't have any.

By the time the crew had lapsed unto peaceful unconsciousness (about two minutes later—a few tablespoons of scumble are a marvelous cure for consciousness, as long as you don't mind the way your head feels next day), Teatime had made his way to Hide Park, politely breaking only the hands of the two unlicensed thieves who tried to pick his pockets on the way there. The park was neutral ground, which made it an excellent place to think, and Teatime needed to think. He had been so focused on getting to Ankh-Morpork that he had actually failed to plan beyond his arrival. That was not only embarrassing, but a source of some concern for Teatime, who made plans and backup plans (and backups to the backup plans) as naturally as breathing. Thinking ahead was vital for any Assassin who was alive and wanted to stay that way, and he had been so anxious to get to Ankh-Morpork that he hadn't thought past stepping off the dock.

Well, he'd better start thinking now. He would have to explain his absence to the Guild (and he didn't even know how long he'd been gone, although piecing together the bits of gossip and news he'd overheard suggested that it had been rather more than a few months, as he'd originally assumed), and he would have to convince them to let him take the black and graduate at last. He had, after all, killed the Hogfather. True, the Hogfather hadn't stayed killed, but neither had he, and Teatime felt his own death certainly still counted, even if he was alive again. He would not, of course, mention his extracurricular experiment in killing Death. The Guild tended to frown on that sort of thing, even when done in the spirit of scientific inquiry.

He mulled over all the other little details of reclaiming his life after an absence of unknown but probably quite protracted duration for some time longer before he was satisfied with his plans. As he was exiting the park to set the first phase into motion, a woman a little further up the road caught his eye.

Teatime had never particularly cared about women the way his classmates at the Assassin's School had. He'd been to the Whore Pits, of course—it was practically a required part of an Assassin's education, although a very informal and rarely discussed part. Consorting with ladies of negotiable virtue was very gentlemanly (as long as one defined gentlemanly as "something gentlemen do" as opposed to "something gentlemen _ought_ to do," a form of semantic gymnastics often used by the Guild, and one that amused Teatime to no end). He perfectly willing to admit that the whole business was quite enjoyable, and he'd even gone back a few times after those first not-quite-official trips, but he'd never understood why other men seemed so stupid about women. There were even some Assassins who wouldn't accept contracts on women, for reasons that had never been entirely clear to Teatime. Inhumation was inhumation, after all, regardless of gender.

There wasn't anything terribly remarkable about this particular young woman, although she stood out in black and grey like a half-burned coal amongst the brightly colored throng of humanity (well, loosely humanity, anyway) around her. That wasn't what had drawn Teatime's attention, though. Perhaps it was something in the set of her head, or the way people seemed to make way for her without really realizing it. Somehow, she seemed vaguely familiar. But she was moving away from him down the street, and he couldn't see well enough to be sure. Curiosity drove him to follow her as she left the main thoroughfare and turned into what was clearly an old but still respectable neighborhood tucked just inside the Long Wall. Unlike some other sections of the city where new construction had crowded in upon the roads until they were little more than a warren of footpaths, the streets here were easily wide enough for a cart to pass, although two going in opposite directions might have had a little difficulty. The foot traffic had dropped off markedly. Teatime weighed the possibility of losing the woman before his curiosity was satisfied against the likelihood of being spotted now that there was no crowd to screen him if she should turn around, and took to the roofs.

The house the woman led him to was strange, less than half the width of its neighbors, whose walls it abutted on either side, but half again as tall. He perched on the roof, watching as she searched through her bag for the key. Just as she found it, a crow called, and Teatime caught a glimpse of her upturned face as she looked in the direction of the sound—dark eyes and pale skin, flushed a little from brisk walking, and, peeking out from beneath the brim of her hat, a few curls of bone-white hair.

The shock was like being doused with ice water. Those eyes belonged to one of the strange, foggy memories that slipped away every time he tried to focus on them. Now the memories came rushing back, sharp and vivid, and he _knew_ those eyes. They had been wide and frightened and lovely, and how could he have forgotten someone as interesting as Susan? Now that he remembered, awareness of her presence and of unfinished business thrummed in the back of his mind and just under his skin, a low, persistent chorus of _susansusansusansusansusan_. It was very much like the wordless pull that had brought him back to Ankh-Morpork, rather than any of the other great cities of the Disc where an Assassin's services were always in demand.

Teatime knew that people often said he would kill you as soon as look at you. He felt that if this statement was in any way inaccurate, it was in that he would usually _rather_ kill people than look at them. Perched on Susan Sto Helit's roof, he found himself once again in the unusual position of wanting to look at her more than he wanted to kill her. He wasn't sure he liked it. She had, after all, impaled him with a poker. (He had to admit, though, that it had been an admirable piece of work, if a little hasty. It took no small amount of skill to throw something as heavy and unwieldy as a poker with sufficient force to impale someone, and rather more skill to make it fly true in the first place.)

He took careful note of the house's location before he left. Before he met Susan again, he wanted to make sure he had the advantage, and that meant making sure he knew the location of every weapon or potential weapon in the house. He grinned to himself as he reached street level again. His plans didn't all need to go into motion at once; he could spare a little time from them for Susan Sto Helit. After all, all work and no play would make Jonathan a very dull boy indeed.

* * *

Susan spent the next several days feeling as if unseen eyes were watching her. Except for the plural, she was absolutely right. When he wasn't trying to reclaim his bank account or find someplace to live while he waited for the Guild to reinstate him, Teatime was learning her routine. For the most part it was quite straightforward: school, followed by errands and an hour or so in the park, then home for the evening. Twice, though, she left school and disappeared. Both times she came home late, with a crease between her eyebrows and a slight frown on her face. Teatime's curiosity about what she had been doing nearly ate him alive.

Finally, he felt secure enough in his familiarity with her schedule to slip into the house one morning after she left. Not through the door—that was for boring, unimaginative people. He went by way of the roof, easing through one of the upper windows that Susan habitually left cracked. When he'd first noticed, he'd thought it foolish, but even his brief period of observation had proved him wrong. She was paid up with the Thieves' Guild, but more than that, Susan had a Reputation. Even unlicensed thieves avoided her house, on the grounds that no sane man wanted to make 'Miss Susan' angry.

The room he found himself in, a single long room which occupied the entirety of the uppermost floor, was clearly a woman's bedroom. There were no ruffles or lace, and it was decorated in dark, muted tones, but it nevertheless had an undefinable air of femininity. Either end of the room was curtained off, and Teatime began to explore cautiously. The bulk of the room held nothing but a fireplace, a battered loveseat, and an even more battered armchair that showed the distinctive marks of heels on one arm. The curtained-off ends proved to be more interesting. Behind one curtain was a massive tub with its own boiler. A stool pulled close to one end held a book and a mostly-empty box of chocolates. The space the other curtain concealed was rather larger than that which held the tub, and Teatime was not much surprised by either the generously-sized bed or the overstuffed bookcase that almost dwarfed it. He was extremely surprised by the sudden, violent rattling from the wooden box on Susan's bedside table. It rattled so violently that it actually moved, jerking towards the edge of the table and almost falling to the floor as another spasm of movement overbalanced it. Teatime put a hand on the box to stop it, and the pulse of magic that greeted him from the thing inside the box was as unexpected as it was familiar.

"Well, well," he murmured. "Wherever did you get this, Susan? And whyever are you keeping it _here_?" A manic grin grew on his face as he considered the box which now lay still and quiet beneath his hand. He gave it a cheerful little pat and began to search for the keys.


	5. A war of lightning

Susan fumbled with her keys, her efforts to coax open the recalcitrant lock on her front door somewhat hampered by the pile of books in her arms that kept threatening to fall over at every movement. She had only intended to get one or two books from the new circulating library (and bless Sacharissa Cripslock for putting the idea forward and leaning on her husband until he agreed to have the Times sponsor it, and _then_ convincing him to donate most of his family library to get things started. That did mean the new library had 17 editions of Twurp's, including the extraordinarily rare illustrated edition, but no library is without its eccentricities), but the temptation had proven too great. Hidden under two serious histories and one rather dense treatise on scrying crystals and their uses, Susan had no fewer than four novels, one of them reputed to be quite scandalous. Finally, the lock turned over with a grudging click and the door swung open. At the same time, the top book gave in to gravity and slipped off the pile just slowly enough for Susan to realize that it was going to land rather heavily on her foot, and that there was no way she could catch it without dropping all the others.

The book never made it. A pale hand flashed into her field of vision and plucked it out of midair, and only her long habit of self-restraint kept Susan from jumping or screaming. Instead, her eyes followed the path from those slender fingers up the black-clad arm, and she found herself staring Jonathan Teatime in the face. Her first thought was that Teatime had been very definitely dead the last time she'd seen him, an unwieldy bundle of fast-cooling flesh hastily tossed up behind Death's saddle. It was quickly drowned out by her second thought, which was that she had forgotten just how… well, beautiful was really the only word for it—how beautiful he was, even with the creepy eyes. And then she realized that it was eyes, when she knew that the scrying stone had been safely locked in its box that morning—a box that she kept _in her bedroom_.

Well, that was terrifying to consider.

He held the book out to her, his expression cheerful and polite. For a fraction of a second she was frozen, torn between a half-dozen conflicting urges. Several of them involved running screaming from her own house, which was almost certainly not going to happen. She broke her paralysis and took the book as casually as she could, as if dead assassins she had personally killed showed up in her home and saved her from bruised toes every day. She could tell he'd registered the pause, though, and there was a hint of satisfaction in his expression, as if her reaction pleased him. Then he made a little gesture, as if inviting her into her own home, and Susan embraced the sharp, clean surge of rage that burned away her uncertainty and surprise, leaving her clearheaded and ready for action.

She swept in past him without another look, and pointedly didn't try to keep him in sight as she stacked the books neatly on the sideboard and hung up her hat. He watched her, and she pretended she couldn't feel his eyes boring into her when her back was turned. It was a calculated risk, turning her back on him, but she'd read enough of his biography to know it would make her interesting, and with Teatime interesting was the closest you could get to safe. All that time reading his biography while she tried to learn about the scrying stone gave her an advantage now. If she could stay interesting, do the unexpected, her chances of surviving long enough to think of a better plan would go up exponentially. Teatime's biography had made that abundantly clear—boring Teatime was as good as signing your own death warrant, but being _interesting_ could earn you a stay of execution. The trouble was walking the fine line between "interesting" and "a challenge". From what Susan could tell, looking like a challenge was at least as dangerous as being boring.

When she finished with the hat and books, she carried on ignoring Teatime while she made tea. The presence of the heavy kettle within arm's reach made her feel a little better about keeping her back to Teatime for so long, and she could only hope that her display of unconcerned domesticity in the face of his presence would qualify as "interesting".

There was a sense of air moving, the heat of another body behind her and breath stirring the little tendrils of hair that had worked their way loose from her bun, but when she turned around he was sitting at the kitchen table, not a hair out of place. Susan had to resist the urge to rub the warm spot on her shoulder where a hand might have rested. All things being equal, she thought she might have preferred the knife. She could deal with attempted violence. She expected him to attempt violence. She didn't know what to do about _touching_ , and she found the bright, reassuring solidity of her anger wavering a little as she sat down across from her uninvited guest.

When she finished her tea, Susan was faced with a dilemma—stay at the table, or carry on as if Teatime wasn't there? The tea in the cup she'd placed in front of him had disappeared at some point, although she would have sworn that he hadn't drunk so much as a drop. That decided her, and she took the tea things away to wash up, maintaining the pretense of normality.

At least, that was the plan. As soon as she'd put everything in the sink, she found herself immobilized by a black clad arm that wrapped around her waist and pinned her arms to her sides as effectively as a steel band. Well, at least he'd waited until the breakables were out of her hands, she thought, and then her brain froze as she registered that Teatime had pulled her flush against him. Her heart skipped a beat and then picked up again in double time. When rational thought kicked back in, it told her that this was a perfectly ordinary response to being held captive by an assassin who still had one hand free and was probably nursing a very serious grudge about the fact that she'd killed him. It had a little bit of a harder time explaining the pleasant tingle at every point where their bodies touched or why the thrill of fear felt very much like a frisson of excitement.

Then Teatime bent close to whisper in her ear and rational thought decamped again.

"Did you miss me, Susan?" His voice was low and dangerous, and it ought to have been completely illegal, because it seemed to bypass her higher functions in favor of going straight for her limbic system and _what the hell was wrong with her_. He traced the line of her throat idly with a finger, and Susan had to grit her teeth and clench her hands into fists to stop herself from gasping. She felt Teatime's silent laughter as a huff of warm breath against her neck, and tightened her fists until she could feel her nails biting into her palm. His hand settled on her collarbone, one finger pressing ever so slightly into the pulse in the hollow at the base of her throat.

"We have ever so much catching up to do," he murmured. "Oh, where are my manners. I almost forgot to thank you for taking such good care of my eye while I was gone." As he spoke his hand moved, brushing gently up the length of her throat before settling and gripping with just enough force to make her exquisitely aware of her pulse hammering beneath his hand and the possibility that he might tighten his grip at any moment. And then he did, and she couldn't quite bite back this gasp, not because he was cutting off her air—he wasn't, although he was just this side of it—but because there was absolutely no way that she could pretend even to herself that the thrill that shot through her was all fear. Teatime was so close to her that she could actually feel the smile that went with his wordless little hum of amusement and satisfaction, the curl of his lips just brushing her ear. She wished desperately for another Banjo, because this was the Tooth Fairy's castle all over again, and she had a very good idea of where this would go unless it was stopped. Worst of all, that scenario was starting to look distinctly appealing—well, parts of it, anyway—despite the little voice in the back of her head screaming things like _homicidal maniac_ and _brain the bastard_.

Eventually it started screaming in the key of _you seriously want to do_ that _with someone who thought it was perfectly reasonable to kill Death?_ That was what finally re-ignited her temper and cleared her head. She flushed with anger at herself when she realized that she hadn't even tried to get away, and threw herself into the effort in earnest to make up for lost time.

That got her almost exactly nowhere, except for prompting Teatime to secure her with both arms. On the one hand, between the clean burn of anger and the absence of the hand on her neck, she was much less distracted. On the other hand, her chances of getting free seemed to be shading away into the negative.

The tolling of the first of the city's many bells broke their silent tableau.

"Oh dear. I'm afraid I must run, Susan. So much to do." The regret in his voice sounded genuine. "Don't worry, though, I'll be back soon!" And just like that, he was back to chirpy madness. Then, as suddenly as she'd been trapped, she was free. She stumbled, then whipped around to find Teatime, preferably to throw something at him. He was standing by the door, and before her fumbling hand could grasp something to throw he had bowed with a flourish and gone, and the latch was clicking shut behind him.


End file.
